Joined Feb 2006
Slickdeals Staff
R U an ultracrepidarian?
Forum Thread
Only read if you are NOT religious and/or do not believe in any 'supreme' being (othe
December 2, 2007 at
08:48 PM
in
Question
personal attacks will not be tolerated and will be mod alerted, if you wish to set someone apart use generalities, such as specific religion not speific person on SD for example
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
you dont get the right to feel insulted, u have been warned...
so, peeps, if you dont believe in god, do you feel that ones that do are delusional?
a lot of people will sight karma or other things as 'he got what he had coming' but i argue that it's all a mathematical randomness that on a small scale might seem like karma
perfect example is: when you play poker and u push with the best hand, a LOT of times, you can predict/be so sure that the card will come that will beat you even if the chance of it coming is less than 1:6. when the card comes, some might argue it as karma, but i argue that its all random, just on a small scale randomness doesn't work
discuss....
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
you dont get the right to feel insulted, u have been warned...
so, peeps, if you dont believe in god, do you feel that ones that do are delusional?
a lot of people will sight karma or other things as 'he got what he had coming' but i argue that it's all a mathematical randomness that on a small scale might seem like karma
perfect example is: when you play poker and u push with the best hand, a LOT of times, you can predict/be so sure that the card will come that will beat you even if the chance of it coming is less than 1:6. when the card comes, some might argue it as karma, but i argue that its all random, just on a small scale randomness doesn't work
discuss....
Community Wiki
Last Edited by Ram|bunc|tious
December 6, 2007
at
06:15 AM
wikipost loves you too!
866 Comments
Your comment cannot be blank.
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
The thing is measuring seratonin levels does not prove love, it proves an existence of something we correlate and attach to an emotion. But it assumes a casuality... does love cause seratonin or seratonin cause love? And are they mutually exclusive?
It's like finding large amounts of aluminum in the brains of Alzheimer's patients... the presence of the former doesn't prove the existence of the latter.
God is not an emotion, it's a "thing/being", it either exists, or doesn't.
But if you don't know, then you could either believe it exists or believe that it doesn't.
I haven't voiced my opinion about the existence of god, mostly because the religious zealots and bible thumpers (not necessarily members of this board) have no hope of convincing me of their side. Growing up in Utah, and NOT being a member of the predominate faith, I have lived with relgious opinions being shoved at me from all directions for most of my life.
I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but we all believe what we do for very personal reasons. Discussions like this, though stimulating, aren't really going to have any impact on any of our opinions.
Since I have nothing to lose here, I'll just say that I'm agnostic. I have no reason to believe that god exists. But believers and non-believers alike, we all see what we want to see. They see a miracle, I see a happy, lucky set of circumstances. I'm not gonna believe it's a miracle, and they won't believe otherwise.
The difference between believing and it actually being true -- is proof. I can PROVE to you that I love my mom, measure the chemicals in my brain (a scientific way), and it goes from being just a belief to being proof.
The same way I can prove PG loves god, but that does not PROVE his existence. (the same way me loving my mom would not prove her existence, it just proves that I love her -- if you met her, it'd be proof of her existence).
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here -- the difference between believing and it actually being so is proof, I gave you SCIENTIFIC proof
If you have never believed you are in love when you really aren't, you haven't gone to the right strip club
BTW it was love your mother love, not in love love originally... and if those are one and the same... I don't' want to know
Also unfortunately browsing through the various forms of arguments on pro g_d side there are many different interpretations. In order to debate successfully there must be an agreed upon interpretation or ideally the correct words and ideas from g_d but not loose interpretations of those that view their idea as correct.
1. It shows the other side of the coin (which I personally am interested in). And all parties participating understand that no one is going to miraculously convert due to this thread.
2. It's stimulating (like you said), and I don't have to go to the podium, and as Dr. Wu said -- they become the argument, while here we're arguing but with real people.
If you have never believed you are in love when you really aren't, you haven't gone to the right strip club
BTW it was love your mother love, not in love love originally... and if those are one and the same... I don't' want to know
and see post 696, I described the difference of belief vs. non-belief.
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
and see post 696, I described the difference of belief vs. non-belief.
So if you want to accept seratonin receptors (which I would questions as proof unless you can prove they cannot be triggered by other effects that would produce a false positive - the McDonalds falacy lets say) as proof, it's entirely possible to love someone but not have proof... I don't stop loving my mother just because I stop releasing the chemicals...
And now here's a continuation... 200 years ago, no one could measure seratonin... no one probably even knew what it was... was it foolish to believe that someone loved their mother then? If not it is no less foolish to believe in a God we cannot YET prove exists...
So if you want to accept seratonin receptors (which I would questions as proof unless you can prove they cannot be triggered by other effects that would produce a false positive - the McDonalds falacy lets say) as proof, it's entirely possible to love someone but not have proof... I don't stop loving my mother just because I stop releasing the chemicals...
The original comment was -- prove to you that I love my mother. Bring me into a test lab, show me pictures of her, and I'm sure I'd have some sort of chemical reaction in my brain which they could measure. (If it was prove to you that I love my wife for example, then I'd say measure serotonin, but I'm not sure if that will apply to the mother idea, but I'm sure there are other chemicals involved).
I proved it to you that it's no longer a belief, but now solid scientific evidence/proof. Now you're going off on tangents saying "well if I do this and this and this, then you wont be able to prove it to me anymore, and it'll just be a belief" How about this - PROVE to me scientifically that god exists, you have no constraints on available resources, and no "what if this wasn't so" situations (and no word of mouth is not scientific proof).
And some of the greatest discoveries in history were made while looking for something completely different... if debating religion gives me incite, even into something not at all related... it certainly was time well spent
Besides it's fun... most people don't exercise their brains enough, debate might be the equivalent of running on a treadmill... not nearly as useful as actually going somewhere... but you still loose weight!
Edit: also no one is saying that it's foolish to believe.
The original comment was -- prove to you that I love my mother. Bring me into a test lab, show me pictures of her, and I'm sure I'd have some sort of chemical reaction in my brain which they could measure. (If it was prove to you that I love my wife for example, then I'd say measure serotonin, but I'm not sure if that will apply to the mother idea, but I'm sure there are other chemicals involved).
I proved it to you that it's no longer a belief, but now solid scientific evidence/proof. Now you're going off on tangents saying "well if I do this and this and this, then you wont be able to prove it to me anymore, and it'll just be a belief" How about this - PROVE to me scientifically that god exists, you have no constraints on available resources, and no "what if this wasn't so" situations (and no word of mouth is not scientific proof).
Edit: also no one is saying that it's foolish to believe.
Also... how do you prove a negative?
The spirit of the not YET statement wasn't that we haven't disapproved, but rather that obviously things can exist that you can't prove, at least given your current tool set.
BTW I would say that believing in something that has little or no proof is absolutely an achievement! A leap of faith is the most dangerous kind of leap there is... accomplishing such a leap is nothing to slouch at... as can be empirically proven by the rarity with which I can accomplish it
There are several good points to make for both sides. But how is it that someone can trust that science will eventually find an answer for something? Science is flawed... it is limited... and it is faulty. People can "believe" that wormholes are out there and can help one travel to different parts of the universe or even potentially time-travel, but how in the world can they believe that? There is no proof, and very limited evidences.
The same is for God. No one can prove God within our finite and limited minds. We are flawed as human beings. But, there are limited evidences as well, along with a vast amount of people who claim a personal experience with a God that is very real. Those personal experiences can not be discredited as simple delusions of grandeur just as much as one won't discredit a scientist for saying that wormhole time travel is possible if the conditions are right.
Is it human nature to state that we are accountable to a higher being, or would you say that it is more human nature to do things that are self-preserving? Believing in God is a difficult thing because it requires one to trust in something that is beyond themselves. But technically, isn't that the same as the scientist who comes up with an idea that has limited evidences, like wormholes?
I personally think that many people have a God... but it's a god that's called science.
So if one is delusional, both must be, no?
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
Many people, those who believe and those who don't, follow the media's account of the discoveries of science w/o demanding any proof. Science is trusted, as you alluded earlier it has elements of a religion, and many people take its pronouncements on faith... they certainly don't go out and read the studies themselves, or become experts in the field of the discovery. If the media tells us that a study found that eating calcium helps you lose weight, then people eat more yogurt. If the media tells us that a study found that oat bran lowers cholestrol... then people eat more oat bran, and oat bran suddenly appears in all kinds of foods in grocery stores.
--
It it a delusion to think that we are in a position to demand things from the universe... or from the author of the universe? It may be. We live in a whole that we did not create... that much we know for sure.
Existence is perplexing.